Digital photography has made the communication of images much easier than in the past. For example, a user may communicate or share an image with another by attaching the image to an e-mail message, posting the image on a website, sharing the image over an instant messaging network, or sharing the image via a mobile phone.
Typically, a user may desire to communicate the image to a particular destination or categorize the image with other images. In order to communicate the image, a user must enter a destination into a communication device or select a destination from a list in the device. The image can be categorized by creating or selecting a category and associating the image with the category.
The communication or organization of images for communication may be inconvenient and time-consuming process for a user. As a result, a user may long delay communicating or organizing images. Further, a user may fail to organize or communicate images at all due to the inconvenience of the task. Many service providers, such as mobile phone service providers, collect revenue when an image is communicated using their services. Therefore, it is desirable for service providers to provide more convenient techniques for communicating images.
One existing technique for communicating images is to let the user define an image object in a system and define a destination to send images containing the image object when the object is recognized in an image. The system may recognize the object in images and send those images to the destination when the object is recognized. This technique requires that the user predefine image objects and identify a destination for images including the image object. The user may be reluctant to input commands for defining image objects and identifying a destination due to the inconvenience of the task. Further, a user that sends images to many different destinations may be even more reluctant to enter the data necessary to implement this technique.
In view of the shortcomings of existing techniques for organizing and communicating images, there exists a need for improved methods, systems, and computer program products for associating an image with a communication characteristic.